Little Richard “Lifetime Friend”
The list of Rock and Roll singers who can scream with full force while still completely servicing a tune is rather short. I would exclude most Heavy Metal singers from the list simply because they are not held to the same melodic challenge. This carve out leaves us with the following Mount Rushmore for tuneful screamers:
Little Richard
John Lennon
Kurt Cobain
Janis Joplin
I think an argument could be made for Pixies-era Frank Black in the number four spot, but what is not in question is the top spot. If you take the Little Richard canon and combine it with Chuck Berry’s, you get the entire origin story of Rock music. And, it could be said that as great and varied as music got after those two, it never got better. Little Richard’s singing inspired the best of early John Lennon, who inspired the best of Kurt Cobain. For those reasons, and countless more, Richard Perriman, from Macon Georgia, resides atop that mountain.
Of Rock’s 50s pioneers, Little Richard proved to be the least enduring and, along with perhaps Jerry Lee Lewis, the biggest soap opera. While Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and, of course, Elvis, cranked out singles and album compilations, Little Richard pivoted back towards his Lord and made occasional Gospel records and live albums. All the while, he was battling crippling drug addiction and struggling for sexual self-acceptance. After his historic early run, much of the 60s and 70s were an erratic blur for Little Richard. His occasional albums were constant disappointments. His even rarer mid-career hits were novelties. He bounced from label to label. He was the butt of jokes for a Counter Culture that didn’t appreciate or empathize with him. His historic fall from greatness is practically unrivaled. It would have been the equivalent of Babe Ruth’s struggling with his weight and booze, relegating him to a career in the minor leagues beginning in 1922. Frankly, it’s a minor miracle that Little Richard lived to be 87.
Along the downward spiral, though, there were a few, brief bright spots. One was in the mid-80s when Little Richard was sober and consistent in his Ministry. He settled a longstanding lawsuit with his former publishers for unpaid royalties, making him solvent after years of financial waste and neglect. Already into his fifties by this time, Richard had been to hell and saw a glimpse of the way back. He accepted that Gospel music was not his one, true calling and resolved to make “messages in rhythm,” as he called it. In 1985, he was surprisingly cast in the Nick Nolte / Richard Dreyfuss / Bette Midler hit comedy, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” catapulting him back into popular culture for the first time in nearly two decades. Richard pounced on the brief notoriety and quickly recorded and released, “Lifetime Friend,” his first album of something approximating Rock and Roll since the early 1970s.
“Lifetime Friend” opens with an alternative version “Great Gosh A’Mighty,” the semi-hit from “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” Co-written with Billy Preston, the song is a raucous Boogie Woogie raver, transported straight from the 50s. The album track, unlike the film version, is weighed down with synth effects and drums into a stew of noise that sounds flat, but not in a “mono” sort of way. In spite of the “band” and mix, though, Little Richard sounds almost perfect. He howls and woots his way through his search for God. His trademark voice sounds like it is constantly testing the limits of the recording, but it somehow never breaks the melody or the mix. It just bangs against the ceiling. “Great Gosh A’Mighty” reached number forty two on the Billboard charts. It’s a cheaply made 80s version of a straight forward, fast paced, late 50s song that happens to feature one of the greatest singers in the history of Rock and Roll. It’s a cheap thrill. But a thrill nonetheless.
To Richard’s credit, each of the ten tracks on “Lifetime Friend” stays true to his evangelism. To his discredit, and to my disappointment, the songs that follow the opening single don’t even amount to exciting 80s Soundtrack fare. Sadly, most of “Lifetime Friend” sounds like a decent 80s wedding band, with a great Little Richard impersonator on lead vocals, playing Christian-themed Boogie-Woogie for customers at a Johnny Rockets diner. There is a sweet and playful “Disney does the 50s” fun in much of the record. But the songs themselves are thinly written and shoddily made. Everything that is vital about Little Richard playing an actual piano is stripped from the songs in favor of synthesizers. The absence of a live drummer is too apparent. And the songs tend to have a single idea, articulated in the refrain, and then repeat themselves without any change or narrative, rhythm or key. “Lifetime Friend” could have succeeded equally at around twenty five minutes instead of forty one.
“Operator,” “I Found My Way” and “Someone Cares” are all of the mid-tempo, low-end, Disney-does-80s-Pointer-Sisters R&B variety. Richard sounds perfectly good on all of these tracks. His voice has held up well, undoubtedly better than the rest of his body. But if you told me that David Hasselhoff’s German record producer made these songs in an Orange County mall karaoke bar, I would not doubt you. Elsewhere, though, we get to hear the singer really stretch his register. On “Somebody’s Comin,” a Caribbean inflected pop song that I don’t especially enjoy, Richard sings somewhere between a falsetto and a rasp. It’s unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. When he does this trick again on “One Ray of Sunshine,” though, he nails it, evoking a voice reminiscent of post-Lionel Commodores or, most accurately, Van Morrison on “Crazy Love” from the album “Moondance.” It’s a lovely and nurturing whisper from a singer who was not known as a screamer and not for his range. “One Ray of Sunshine” is also the only song that features a mostly live band on the record. It’s not the best song on the album, but it’s miles away the best performance. Of the remaining tracks, “I Found My Way” is the only one worth mentioning if only for the fact that it features Little Richard rapping. Like most of the album, it sounds like a cheap joke today. I’d venture that, even in 1986, it sounded like desperate, unintentional humor.
“Lifetime Friend” was the last solo album of new Rock music that Little Richard released. In the 90s, he made a children’s music album and collaborated with guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka on covers of his old classics, as an offering to his Japanese fans. And that was it. For decades, the image of Little Richard -- the elaborate suits, the hairdos, the make-up, the thin moustache -- threatened to consume his musical legacy. He was a troubled, aging Men for decades longer than he was a Pop star. He toured regularly in the early 2000s, but sciatica soon ended his life on the road. By 2013, on the cusp of eighty, Little Richard retired from Music. His last proper album was not good. But when it was good, it was very good. And when Little Richard was very good, he was great. And when he was great, he was perhaps the very best. Little Richard was, briefly, Babe Ruth.